Longitudinal Phenotyping of Circulating Tumor Cells using a Scalable Deep Learning Framework
Matthew L. Bootsma, Marina N. Sharifi, Jamie M. Sperger, Jennifer L. Schehr, Will Stump, Hamza Bakhtiar, Matthew Mannino, Viridiana Carreno, Alex H. Chang, Charlotte Stahlfeld, Emily Abella, Muhammad Dar, Kaitlin Durnen, Hannah M. Krause, David Gallo, Amy K. Taylor, Petros Grivas, Pedro C. Barata, Nan Sethakorn, Ticiana A. Leal, Cristina I. Truica, Ruth O'Regan, Xiao X. Wei, William A. Hall, Hamid Emamekhoo, Christos E. Kyriakopoulos, David F. Jarrard, Anthony Serritella, Vincent T. Ma, Rana R. McKay, Kari B. Wisinski, Scott Tagawa, Scott M. Dehm, Joshua M. Lang, Shuang G. ZhaoAbstract
Purpose: Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) provide a minimally invasive window into metastatic disease and treatment response, but their clinical utility has been constrained by manual, subjective, low-throughput identification in multi-channel fluorescence microscopy data. Methods: To address this limitation, we developed and clinically validated the System for Enhanced Evaluation of Tumor Cells (SEE-TC), a deep learning approach for scalable, reproducible phenotyping of individual circulating cells. SEE-TC was developed and evaluated on more than 8.5 million cells from 3,386 blood samples spanning six cancer types, enabling generalization across heterogeneous imaging conditions, staining panels, and acquisition platforms. Results: SEE-TC achieved single-cell segmentation accuracy on par with humans, learned biologically relevant latent cellular representations that correlate with established morphological and immunofluorescent biomarkers, and reliably distinguished CTCs from background populations without reliance on arbitrary thresholds. When applied longitudinally, SEE-TC provides a quantitative, patient-level readout of CTC burden over time which was significantly associated with worse overall survival across multiple cancer types. Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the first fully automated AI approach to single-cell segmentation and CTC phenotyping. By transforming CTC analysis from a human-dependent task into a scalable and reproducible digital assay, SEE-TC enables high-fidelity longitudinal monitoring of tumor burden and supports broader clinical deployment of CTC-based liquid biopsies in precision oncology. It is currently being deployed to identify CTCs and quantify target expression for both prognostic and predictive biomarker evaluation in multiple prospective clinical trials on a commercial platform.